Seeing as how Keegan McInroe released an album entitled A Good Old Fashioned Protest in 2017, and, given the abrogation of civil liberties that has happened before our very eyes in the past year, I was kind of surprised to learn that the Fort Worth singer-songwriter’s new album is not of a political bent. Instead of an album full of songs like Protest’s “Bombing for Peace,” Neon John couches McInroe’s experiences with love, lust, and heartbreak in the same drily humorous, observational tone used on both Protest and Dusty Passports and Empty Beds, his 2024 album that unpacked his feelings about life during the COVID-lockdown era.
To be honest, hearing a troubadour’s ruminations on the emotional downside to his troubadour life is a welcome break from the headlines. Consider Neon John-midpoint track “Wild and Free,” which bears this verse: “Well, it ain’t no kind of mystery / I’d had a bit of history / With women who have tried to tie me down / But when I pick up the rope myself / And offer it to someone else / It always seems to wind up on the ground.”
There’s struggle there: lonesome versus lonely, confidence against rejection, the quip that covers the bruised feelings. It’s kind of sad, but McInroe makes it all kind of funny.
“Yeah, so I’ve collected a lot of these, uh, romantic misadventures, if you can believe it,” he told me in a phone interview. “I mean, you know, they wouldn’t necessarily have to be misadventures, but in my case, they almost always are. There are eight songs on the new album, but I really have so many more.”
While he might be unlucky when it comes to matters of the heart, McInroe was a lot more fortunate with Neon John’s title track. While playing a gig in Bluff Dale, he introduced some “new material” with some future plans. “I mentioned before [performing] ‘Neon John,’ ‘When I get the money together, I’ll be putting it on a new album,’ and I played the song or whatever.”
As luck would have it, someone in the crowd paid attention. Later, this person (whom McInroe declines to identify) financed much of Neon John’s production. So, McInroe certainly lucked out in that regard.
“Neon John,” about an amiable frequenter of a red-light district, ambles into your ears like a shithoused relative, funny and wheels-off and more than a little sad. “Neon John, will it fill the hole / All the pleasures you have known?” McInroe sings, his weathered baritone carrying the concern like a tobacco note in a pour of bourbon. McInroe deftly balances the wry (and, I suppose, the rye) and the sincere in his songs, and the album’s other seven tales carry those wistful currents to varying degrees.
“Blackout Beauty,” co-written with Fort Worth singer-songwriter Matt Tedder, is a boogie-woogie paean to one-night stands that hardly regrets its own hangover, while “Post-Wedding Weekend Blues” laments, “She’s got a man / All I’ve got is the muse.”
In McInroe’s love life, there’s a space between the double-entendres and double beds, where, in the heat of the moment, the socks and underwear land. When you notice it later, sometimes it’s funny and endearing. Other times, it’s a small pile of regret.
Either way, Neon John is a fun listen. Produced and engineered by Ben Hussey at his Melody Mountain Studios in Stephenville, the tracks have an easy-going, ramblin’-gamblin’ gait to them, courtesy of bassist Aden Bubeck and drummer Grady Don Sandlin, who give McInroe’s hazy morning-after yarns a hefty, two-steppin’ swing. McInroe, who, in addition to writing and singing the songs, plays acoustic and resonator guitars on the album, said that with the added budget, he was able to put together the studio band he’d been dreaming of, a who’s-who of local C&W luminaries. Besides Bubeck (Miranda Lambert) and Sandlin, his studio musicians include Gary Grammer on harmonica; Presley Haile on vocals; Morris Holdahl on guitar, lap steel, and backing vocals; Dirt Stinnett on mandolin and fiddle; and keyboardist Chris Watson. The songs work well as acoustic solo jams, but with a studio band behind him, McInroe makes you feel like you were there when his stories happened.
McInroe’s music puts the storytelling at the forefront — sometimes you get the feeling that he could be in the middle of telling one amusing vignette or another and happened to strum along with himself almost as an afterthought — in part because he’s built a life that lends itself to situations that easily become stories. He’s been a musician for over 20 years and has seen just about every corner of the Lone Star State, as well as plenty of other corners, having crisscrossed the United States, United Kingdom, and Western Europe in those two decades. When I spoke with him over the phone, he was on the road between gigs in Houston and Spicewood, and those gigs had come in the wake of a week spent in New Orleans with his friend, Nashville-based songwriter Heidi Holton, for the Folk Alliance International Conference. From New Orleans, they played gigs in Lake Charles and Port Neches, followed by another in Huntsville, then Houston. McInroe has an itinerant, travel-light, go-where-the-wind takes him credo. It would be weird if he didn’t have stories about romantic misadventures.
Still, it would be just as weird if he didn’t write about the times we’re living in. “I am working on a concept album with a friend that isn’t as on-the-nose as A Good Old Fashioned Protest was,” McInroe said. “There’s a lot of things right now to inspire those kinds of songs, so that will probably be [the next album] if it gets written in a reasonable amount of time or I’m just itching to make something, but if not, I have sequels to Neon John for days.”
Keegan McInroe
8pm Fri w/Heidi Holton at The Post, 2736 W 6th St, Fort Worth. $15. ThePostFW.com.
